Big news from Mozilla and Samsung today: the two have been working on a new browsing engine together, developed from the ground-up to be completely new, and it's written entirely in Rust, a new safe systems language developed by Mozilla. "Rust, which today reached v0.6, has been in development for several years and is rapidly approaching stability. It is intended to fill many of the same niches that C++ has over the past decades, with efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. But beyond that, it is safe by default, preventing entire classes of memory management errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. Rust also features lightweight concurrency primitives that make it easy for programmers to leverage the power of the many CPU cores available on current and future computing platforms." The work is on-going, but of course, all code is out there right now.

Why is it interesting? It's interesting because they're not resting on their laurels. It's interesting because they're not only not ceding to the WebKit mono-culture, they're expanding beyond Gecko itself, and, ideally, taking all that they have learned in the past several years to a new engine.

Perhaps the ARM environment was different enough to make a new engine worth exploring vs simply porting and tweaking Gecko. It also acts as a solid use case for their new language, so it's a win win.

It's a win win even if it doesn't pan out, for whatever reason. Consider it basic research.

So, yea, interesting. Exciting. A mature industry and still doing the hard work and moving forward. Good for them.